¿Es Internet sostenible?

En el web de Véspera de Nada hay algunos datos interesantes al respecto del coste energético del hardware.

Lendo a John Michael Greer vexo que tamén lle preocupa o tema e que é máis que pesimista ao respecto. Copio aquí algunhas frases do seu artigo The End of the Information Age:

(…) the looming impact of a future of energy constraints on the ways that modern industrial cultures store, process, and distribute information.

(…)

(…) the central weakness of an information-centered society: information does not exist without a physical substrate, and if the physical substrate goes, so does the information.

(…) the internet – depends just as much on a physical substrate (…) that substrate is the global network of communications links and server farms, and the even vaster economic and technical infrastructure that keeps them funded, powered, and supplied with the trained personnel and spare parts that keep them running.

Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to maintain the information economy actually is.
(…) the two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together.

(…) the economics of the internet take on a very different shape as energy becomes scarce and expensive again.

(…)

Once the cost of maintaining it in its current form outstrips the income that can be generated by it, it becomes a losing proposition, and cheaper modes of information storage and delivery will begin to replace it in its more marginal uses.

(…)

(…) as energy costs move unsteadily upward and resource needs increasingly get met, or not, on the basis of urgency, expect access costs to rise, government regulation to increase, internet commerce to be subject to increasing taxation, and rural areas and poor neighborhoods to lose internet service altogether. There may well still be an internet a quarter century from now, but it will likely cost much more, reach far fewer people, and have only a limited resemblance to the free-for-all that exists today.

(…)

The waning of the internet will pose an additional challenge to the future, because – like other new technologies – it is in the process of displacing older technologies that provided the same services on a more sustainable basis.

Intrígame saber cal é o consumo medio de cada bit ou de cada byte que trasmitimos pola Internet (ao navegar, descargar arquivos, enviar emails, etc.).

Vou facer unha pequena aproximación.

Desta páxina podemos tomar o consumo, sendo conservadores, nun 3% do total de electricidade mundial (ano de ref.: 2010). Se estimamos nuns 17.000.000.000.000 KWh a electricidade total (ref: http://www.indexmundi.com/world/electricity_consumption.html ano 2007) teriamos aproximadamente 510.000.000.000 KWh consumidos cada ano pola Internet.

Segundo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte teríamos 5 zetabytes trasmitidos no ano 2008. Iso son 5.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 bytes.

Xa que logo teriamos 510 x 10⁹ KWh (aprox. 5 x 10¹¹) que dividirmos entre 5 x 10²¹. Teriamos como resultado 1 x 10^-10 KWh por cada byte trasmitido, ou 1 x 10^-7 Wh. Se trasmitimos 1 KB gastariamos 0,0001024 Wh. Para 1 MB serían 0,1 Wh. Para chegar a 1 Wh precisariamos trasmitir 10 MB. E para 1 KWh, xa que logo, 10.000 MB, ou sexa aproximadamente 1 GB.

Ter acesa unha bombilla de 20 W durante 1 hora é equivalente segundo estes cálculos a trasmitir 200 MB pola Internet.

1 KB -> 0,0001 Wh = 1 bombilla de 20 W durante 0,018 segundos.

Eu coido que a isto habería que sumar o consumo do PC cliente ou do dispositivo que se conecta a Internet, xa que as estatísticas de consumo refírense á Rede e non aos dispositivos de usuario.

Simone Santini ofrece un panorama que se o vencellamos co que eu reflectía neste artigo e a situación á que nos expón o colapso civilizatorio a raíz do peak oil, é como para comezar a nos preocuparmos de conservar o máis útil nun futuro postindustrial.

Lendo a Antonio Turiel recupero un dato:

Hace poco un estudio de la Universidad de Berkeley estimaba que internet (entendido como toda la maraña de ordenadores y dispositivos que se conectan a la red global, la misma red y sus routers y demás adminículos) consume alrededor del 2% de toda la energía a escala global.

http://www.neoteo.com/internet-consume-el-2-de-la-energia-mundial

http://www.enter.co/chips-bits/enterprise/gasto-excesivo-de-energia-el-costo-oculto-de-internet/

Ahí tienes más datos.